A lucky accident that IBM failed to prevent, they didn't want to have such a market, Compaq made it possible, with a clever way to prevent it legally.

The devices ship with a kernel that can use them. Is there anything we can do to make it easier to extract whatever device tree or other information from the compiled kernel it ships with, so it can be used with any other Linux kernel?

It is very puzzling. We have a plethora of brands from chinese, korean, european and american companies to kickstarter-funded projects to reskinned odm designs in developing markets,- all vying and clawing at each other to stand out in an oversaturated market with more cameras, more pixels, more features like AI, and filters and what-not. Yet not one of these companies think to release a phone that proffers to give the best rooting experience or Lineage OS compatibility - or better yet, comes with LineageOS out-of-the-box.

> uphill battle against a swarm of slightly different CPUs and device trees

Economic incentives for "differentiation", e.g. device tree with upstream Linux and uboot support for feature A, but non-upstream uboot blob enables feature A+B.

One issue between then and now is that there’s a hell of a lot more people now that are aware what transpired then and what steps to take to prevent or sabotage a burgeoning clone market.

With the vendor/system split introduced by project Treble in Android, it should be easier than ever to build your own system against a rich set of hardware abstractions, that work on a wide range of devices. Assuming you are ok with still running a very thick slice of the stack as proprietary vendor image.

It’s even hard to find the uboot patches for clockworkpi hardware, and they open source almost everything.

N900 was my first smartphone and still miss the feeling of having a proper Linux box in my pocket. Unfortunately didn't buy the n9 as it was clear it was dead in the water by the time it came out.

Based on my contacts at Nokia it was simply underfunding, believing that symbian would remain dominant in developing countries and seeing the meamo/meego line as a distracting and expensive side project as well as internal competition which people sought to sabotage internally. Some ex-Nokia people blogged quite extensively on it.

The N900 was phenomenal for its time. One of the best smartphones ever made. If you just wanted to use it as a smartphone you could but if you wanted to dig deeper it was such a versatile and capable device.

I still use Sailfish OS, but it's becoming more frustrating with more and more things locked into proprietary apps (which are only available for android and ios) with no option to do things over a web interface. Just the other day I had to leave a laundromat because they only accepted payment via their mobile app.

Nokia may have had an opportunity; however, you may not remember history, but the iPhone 1 was a game changer, and one thing that Android did right was to immediately adapt to the new form factor. Android won its place in the duopoly because it was and still is technically excellent, it adapted faster, and because it was immediately available to use by phone makers, borrowing many good lessons from Windows.

The truth is, there was no more room left for a no. 3. The writing was on the wall for those able to see, Nokia's alternatives were out, much like Blackberry, regardless of what they did.

I, too, was unhappy with Nokia's move to producing Windows Phones. But Microsoft, compared to other companies, knows how to build operating systems and create developer ecosystems around them. If Microsoft failed, IMO, Nokia did not stand a chance.

> All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won't give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.

I don't know about that. What's left are the things the existing platforms won't give you.

Example: uBlock, but for apps. Runs the app in a container and blocks network requests to tracking servers, or otherwise modifies the app to remove misfeatures. Think: Game Genie for social media apps.

The problem is you don't just need the killer app, you also need all of the existing apps, and hardware to run it on. So the real problem is you need your new system to be able to do that, but simultaneously be able to run common Android apps on common Android hardware.

> Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.

Meego, Maemo was really early experimentation IMHO. WebOS and Tizen were two worthy contenders, but both of them went to die in enterprise institutions that have no understanding how to create a product. HP absolutely smashed WebOS, and Samsung in its usual ultra hostile fashion destroyed any open source potential Tizen had. HP, Samsung, and Oracle is where Open Source goes to die.

Wanna buy my N900? I don't miss using it. Especially its abysmal GPS, abysmal video recording, resistive touchscreen, terrible manual calendar sync setup, no choice of map software, etc. etc. Good riddance. That proper keyboard alone couldn't make up for everything else.

Even the N8 was comparable to the android I have today after 14 years. Full touch screen, great battery life, excellent camera quality, great maps, regular OS updates, ran all the software it had smoothly and could be programmed in C++ with Qt Creator.

Then Microsoft came and ruined the N series by making nokia release some broken version of the OS (code named anna and then bella) so that people would buy Lumia. After a couple of months, there was no more application store. What terrible blunder that was.

My understanding as well that Nokia bet everything on Symbian.

It is coming, PC Clones only happened due to IBM not being able to legally prevent it taking off.

It is no accident that the laptops as desktop replacement are just as vertically integrated, most people not using laptops have NUCs and game consoles, and custom built PC towers are seldom seen outside hardcore PC gamers.

Working with all major systems I have to say I don't have the feeling that the commercial OS is getting any better. If anything they are getting worse.

What is getting better are the likes of KDE. Where a good decade ago running Linux still was a pain where it didn't work, nowadays it mostly just works, the System UIs are more usable, more customizable and in many cases better than any of the commercial OS for a while now (and yes, that includes MacOS).

Android is a pain in the rear, IOS similarily so.

And that's one of the strongest criticisms of Stallman's Free Software. Instead of providing alternatives, they are just against them.

Of course they tried to provide alternatives, but they are still stuck 30 years behind, they haven't gotten to phones yet. During Covid they had issues getting videoconferences to work.

FSF's position is restrictive in the sense that it limits the choices you have. On non-mobile, while a lot of people agree with FSF's point of view, in practice they have to make exceptions.

(There's the urban legend that you're always breaking some law even when you try your best not to; probably you're also always running some opaque firmware blob even when you try your best not to).

I don't see mobile users making any compromise like this, unless a gigantic scandal happens.

That's because you treat a FOSS project with a commercial mentality.

Remember the first post Torvalds made for the kernel?

He didn't say "I'm doing a project to compete as fast as I can with commercial UNIX machine so please help"

He sid this: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"

And it became huge. By chance.

A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp. It should be open, fun to tinker with, modular and, maybe, with enough logic to handle carrier signal and SMS.

Even if it's not successful, the code and schematics will still live somewhere on the Internet, ready for anyone to create a weird steampunk phone.

Most people that want a Linux phone don't care about freedom of tech. They just want some portable Unix workstation with all the comfort of a commercial phone.

Which it's not wrong by itself. But demanding Open Source to create another "commercial-like but gratis" it's already a bad attitude to start with

I've given up on ever expecting an open source phone. Apple likely spends more money developing just the keyboard than these OSS companies have to spend on the entire phone, software and hardware. There is just no way they can release something that's even usable, let alone competitive.

Did have an unexpected win in the form of the Steam Deck though. Never thought I'd have a powerful hand held, desktop linux gaming machine at an affordable price. Back in the day I was following the Dragonbox Pyra project and really liked the idea, but couldn't justify spending so much on a device that couldn't really do anything.

Why can’t Facebook spearhead such a project? Zuck has always complained about closed ecosystems not allowing them to release cool features. Google forbids android OEMs from developing devices for other mobile stack. So we really have two hurdles.

I think you're looking for waydroid? AFAIK it does in fact have most of an android system bundled into it and it doesn't do rootless windows (Android apps are rendered into a single window that contains an entire Android UI), but it absolutely works. Funny enough, I use it on my laptop because Anki has dependency problems on my system but the F-Droid version is fine.

This. I try to collect all that happens weekly in the space at https://linmob.net

And security, don't forget that. Proper app isolation on Linux is still very tricky, with many competing approaches in Apparmor/Selinux/Snap/Flatpak/Docker, all complicated to set up and use. The consequence is that in practice a 2048 game has unlimited access to the files in my /home folder.

On the other hand, Android has a very solid permission and isolation system. This is why I don't want GNU/Linux on my phone; I would rather have a proper FOSS Android.

There's a lot of building going on. Waydroid builds their own highly specialized Android derivative. As does Replicant, Calyx, Graphene, /e/foundation, Lineage, microg, and probably lots more in the Foss space alone.

What do you want that LineageOS (plus F-Droid) doesn't do?

It's impossible because of hardware attestation. Until something is done for that (and "legal" seems the only way), there is no solution

Google is clamping on that freedom by providing ways to detect when you run unauthorized/liberated software (i.e. root or custom ROM)

That's exactly what I was going to mention. I'm waiting for android 15 to be released and for people to test hardware acceleration support. If the overheating problems are fixed, I'll get myself a pixel 9 XL (for the bigger battery) and use it as my laptop daily driver replacement.

If performance is any good (fingers crossed for something close to the latest raspberry pi) then it's the perfect machine: usb C displayport, it fits in your pocket, can run proper Linux, fallback to Android for steam Link until valve releases an ARM version of steam. It'll be perfect.

For actual laptop form factor usage, I'll connect the xreal glasses to get a big display and I'll use the pixel as a keyboard and trackpad, or an external keyboard and the pixel as a trackpad.

Can't wait for people to test android 15.

All hail Big G in our Temple of Tensor. Amen.

In my mind part of the "Linux Phone" package is moving primarily to a package repo software distribution solution. You can slap an App Store-esque frontend on it, but the software you're installing is (by default) from a curated list of supported open source packages, not random binaries from untrustworthy parties. Of course, this mentality is losing support even on desktop Linux with the move to Snaps/Flatpacks/AppImages/etc, which is a real shame.

Well... yeah, don't do that. I mean this seriously, not facetiously; when I say I want a Linux phone what I mean is I want a phone that runs Debian or whatever (on bare metal, with good quality of experience, and with a mainline kernel) and where I install software out of the official repos using apt (or whatever).

(Also plenty of people on desktop Linux do `curl | sh`, and some of us are getting most of our Android apps out of F-Droid; I'm not sure the distinction runs quite the way you're suggesting.)

Gaming handheld would give you that. There are also old Intel-Atom based tablet PC's that are quite cheap on the second-hand market, and work well with Linux. Smartphone/palmtop form factor would be harder though.

Last decade's definition of "power user" is "being able to type on physical keyboard and have more than 1 window open at a time", and Android caters to that; it would not even remotely be decent, though it'll likely eat just a bit more battery and cpu than a pure XFCE running without compositing.

That's basically a Chromebook, which can run both Android apps and Linux apps.

Yeah, let's make desktops unusable toys as well

Nope, it is a custom Linux kernel with goodies that aren't available upstream like first level support for clang, several Rust modules (no need to argue with anti-Rust kernel folks), all security features turned on, and a micro-kernel like driver subsystem, supporting Java, C++ and Rust.

> Just without open-source drivers for some freakish reason

Because manufacturers buy random parts from other suppliers, who may or may not own the source code, and they often legally simply can’t share forward that code.

> Pay up and be grateful!)

Website says it's only sold in EU. How is that verified?

It looks like it doesn't support android safetynet hardware attestation so banking apps etc won't work.

So far, we can't even get Samsung to have their FOSS kernel stuff published in a buildable and usable form - its basically impossible to build their recent kernels with their recent toolchains without finding out that some obscure config option was skipped or that some file didn't survived the pre-release purge or that it requires some obscure Linux distribution to run on. And if you get it to build, chances that it will boot are slim. (Good luck finding out if there's a working UART somewhere on chip pins and it's not hidden behind hypervisor and fuses)

Why would the government ever force carriers to accept uncertified devices? So they can emit interference on cellular frequency bands? So they can violate SAR limits and burn people?

It was the governments that require that certification, and for good reasons.

We can play this “wild west hacker” whatever, but rules are a necessity for a working society, one can’t just start driving on the other side of the road, and neither would we be ahead with random frequencies getting emitted everywhere.

Any recommendations for modern-ish devices which run Sailfish?

Can the "free trial" be used indefinitely if you don't need Android app support?

No, its something i strongly agree with. The phone ecosystem is a locked in disaster. If phone hardware was required to support some standard like x86 computers do we could turn all this apple amd android crap ibto something that actually respects privacy

Is this a parody question?

Sadly that isn’t really enough today - since many applications will refuse to function if SafetyNet fails because you have some non-standard image running.